


Movements

by BlameMyMuses



Series: Beat and Melody [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen, Meteor, Multi, Photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-06 00:57:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4201800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlameMyMuses/pseuds/BlameMyMuses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave captures moments on the meteor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Movements

It's kind of an invasion of privacy, when you get right down to it, because you aren't asking for permission. It's just that you have the feeling that time is slipping away...and when you get that feeling you pay attention, because it usually means something important. There have been enough doomed Daves to drive that particular point home.   
  
And, really, you're not hurting anything. It's just photos. Innocuous ones, of your friends, around the table at meals, or fighting over video game controllers. Snapshots of Terezi and the Mayor lording over Can Town (fairly, and with JUST1C3, of course). Rose, reaching out to tuck a bit of hair back behind Kanaya's ear (sickeningly tender and not at all an expression you ever thought you'd see on your ecto-sister's face, not in all your lifetimes). Sollux hunched behind a computer screen (they all look the same, but you still take more). Karkat crouched low speaking into a vent like it'll ever do more than just HoNk back at him (fewer now, than at the start, because the elusive Gamzee Makara done broke your bro's heart).

 

Lots of photos of Aradia. She's hard to get a good photo of, always moving, but you like a challenge. It's just snapshots with your iShade's camera, and they're hardly quality photography, but you like to capture moments. Things are all winding up, and sooner or later the spring's gonna come undone, and you'll be there, at the final rest, a final crescendo into the new universe, and you have no idea what you'll be allowed to take with you. Maybe your syllabus. Maybe the clothes on your back or the shades on your face. Maybe only your memories.

 

Maybe not even those.

 

You've got a darkroom all set up in an infrequently used corner of the meteor—honestly, it's like being fucking Eloise, the whole fucking Plaza to yourself, because there are rooms and rooms that are unused and unwanted, and you've got free reign to wander where you will—and you still sometimes dabble in film photography. It's cheap and easy to alchemize, uses barely any grist, and you like it well enough...

 

But the subject matter is so bland. You can only take so many photos all saturated in that same gray-orange light of stone walls and artificial ambiance.

 

Your friends remain bright points, lovely little solos in the movement, and you find yourself getting underfoot (dead Daves do pile up, after all) to sneak closeups of things like Rose's hands as she knits, or the way Terezi's hands look covered in chalk.

 

(and then the way her mouth looks when she smiles

 

all grey and black skin and lips

 

bright pastels of blue and red and green painting her tongue and cheeks because your girl never could leave well enough alone)

 

The red is starting to come into Karkat's eyes, and you run away from his snarling more than once after startling him awake with the bright flash of your camera.

 

(you like the way he looks still sleep drugged and quiet snarling more from habit and nightmares than animosity and he seems so unguarded then that you

 

you

 

well youre a knight and its your fucking job isnt it

 

to preserve

 

to keep safe

 

to treasure)

 

Eventually Aradia catches on. She's sharp, your moirail. Always noticing. For all you know, a future you went behind present you's back and told past her. You wouldn't put it past yourself. Or future her.

 

She catches you coming from the darkroom, a stack of newly developed photos in your hands, and you're so absorbed in flipping through them that you almost run into her. She's sneaky, and likes to appear suddenly in places she knows you're going to be, always a wide half-manic grin to startle you back into awareness.

 

She claims it's to keep you on your toes. You're pretty sure she's just a sadist.

 

You love her anyway.

 

You love them all, really.


End file.
